Benjamin Roy Mottelson

Benjamin Roy Mottelson
(1926)

American-Danish physicist who shared the 1975 Nobel Prize for Physics
with Aage N. Bohr and James Rainwater for his work in determining the
asymmetrical shapes of certain atomic nuclei and the reasons behind
such asymmetries.
Having taken his doctorate in theoretical physics at Harvard University
in 1950, Mottelson accepted a fellowship at the Niels Bohr Institute
of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen and then joined the faculty of
the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Nuclear Physics there; he subsequently
became a naturalized Danish citizen.

From experiments conducted in collaboration with Bohr in the early
1950s, Mottelson discovered that the motion of subatomic particles can
distort the shape of the nucleus, thus challenging the widely accepted
theory that all nuclei are perfectly spherical. Subsequently it was
discovered that such asymmetries occur in atoms of all elements.